famous historians, biography, biographical detail, famous historians, biographies
[famous historians, biography, biographical detail] leopold von ranke, simon schama, eric hobsbawm, jacques barzun, fernand braudel

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Famous Historians

"The historian should be fearless and incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth; one who, as the poets says, calls a fig a fig and a spade a spade. He should yield to neither hatred nor affection, not should be unsparing and unpitying. He should be neither shy nor deprecating, but an impartial judge, giving each side all it deserves but no more. He should know in his writing no country and no city; he should bow to no authority and acknowledge no king. He should never consider what this or that man will think, but should state the facts as they really occurred."


 Lucian (A.D. 120-200)



We have assembled biographical details on the careers of many famous historians. These biographies have been well received as several of them have been frequently linked to by other web sites showing that there is a fair degree of interest in biography about famous historians - "the 'genius' who can write about History rather than 'any fool' who can make it" - (with thanks to Oscar Wilde and all that).
Lord Acton
Jacques Barzun Fernand Braudel
Jacob Burckhardt Thomas Carlyle
Niall Ferguson Edward Gibbon
Herodotus Eric Hobsbawm
Johan Huizinga Isaiah Berlin
Thomas Macaulay
Friedrich Meinecke Jules Michelet
Leopold von Ranke Simon Schama
A.J.P. Taylor Antony Beevor
Adam Hart-Davis
Edward Augustus Freeman Edward Augustus Freeman
Essay - Race and Language

Popular European History pages
at Age-of-the-Sage


The preparation of these pages was influenced to some degree by a particular "Philosophy of History" as suggested by this quote from the famous Essay "History" by Ralph Waldo Emerson:-

    There is one mind common to all individual men...
Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of his manifold spirit to the manifold world.

Italian Unification - Cavour, Garibaldi and
the Unification of Risorgimento Italy 		Otto von Bismarck &
The wars of German unification
Italian unification map
Risorgimento Italy		 Map of German unification
1 The European Revolution of 1848 begins
A broad outline of the background to the onset of the turmoils and a consideration of some of the early events.

2 The French Revolution of 1848
A particular focus on France - as the influential Austrian minister Prince Metternich, who sought to encourage the re-establishment of "Order" in the wake of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic turmoils of 1789-1815, said:-"When France sneezes Europe catches a cold".

3 The Revolution of 1848 in the German Lands and central Europe
"Germany" had a movement for a single parliament in 1848 and many central European would-be "nations" attempted to assert a distinct existence separate from the dynastic sovereignties they had been living under.

4 The "Italian" Revolution of 1848
A "liberal" Papacy after 1846 helps allow the embers of an "Italian" national aspiration to rekindle across the Italian Peninsula.

5 The Monarchs recover power 1848-1849
Some instances of social and political extremism allow previously pro-reform conservative elements to support the return of traditional authority. Louis Napoleon, (who later became the Emperor Napoleon III), attains to power in France offering social stability at home but ultimately follows policies productive of dramatic change in the wider European structure of states and their sovereignty.
Introductory quotations
.
"Central" mysticism insights
.
"Other" spiritual wisdom
.
"Central" poetry insights
.
"Other" poetry wisdom
.
Spirituality & the wider world
.

Particularly
Popular
Pages
.
  Hot Hot Hot  


The most "original" linked historical pages that are accesssible from this page consider:-

Emerson's call for a "transcendentalist"
approach to the Study of History.


  These pages attempt to explore whether there might be any validity in Emerson's assertion that the Human Mind contains a pattern that has proven to be the foundation for the Unfolding of History.    

Emerson, Transcendentalism,
and the Unfolding of History

  The Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant was adopted and adapted by many other people in Europe and the Americas, one of the more interesting instances of these adoptions / adaptions being that of the New England Transcendentalists.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the most far-seeing of the New England Transcendentalists, he came to believe that all people share a 'commonality of mind' and that it is this mind that acts as a foundational pattern for historical developments.
Emerson's view suggests that :-

" man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots,
whose flower and fruitage is the world. "

"There is one mind common to all individual men.
  Of the works of this mind history is the record. Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history. all the facts of history pre-exist as laws. Each law in turn is made by circumstances predominant. The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of this manifold spirit to the manifold world".

Towards the end of his Essay, History, Emerson asserts that :-

" every history should be written in a wisdom which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is".

"History is for human self-knowledge ... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is."
R. G. Collingwood

Explore Human Nature thru our radical
Human Nature - Tripartite Soul page

Emerson's call for a
"Transcendental Approach" to History
The Unfolding of History
1 The European Revolution of 1848 begins
A broad outline of the background to the onset of the turmoils and a consideration of some of the early events.

2 The French Revolution of 1848
A particular focus on France - as an Austrian foreign minister said "When France sneezes Europe catches a cold".

3 The Revolution of 1848 in the German Lands and central Europe
"Germany" had a movement for a single parliament in 1848 and many central European would-be "nations" attempted to assert a distinct existence separate from the dynastic sovereignties they had been living under.

4 The "Italian" Revolution of 1848
A "liberal" Papacy after 1846 helps allow the embers of an "Italian" national aspiration to rekindle across the Italian Peninsula.

5 The Monarchs recover power 1848-1849
Some instances of social and political extremism allow previously pro-reform conservative elements to support the return of traditional authority. Louis Napoleon, (who later became the Emperor Napoleon III), attains to power in France offering social stability at home but ultimately follows policies productive of dramatic change in the wider European structure of states and their sovereignty.
The "anti-revolutionary" mindset
of the Dynastic governments
from 1815 until after the Crimean War
Italian Unification - Cavour, Garibaldi and
the Unification of Risorgimento Italy 		Otto von Bismarck &
The wars of German unification
Italian unification map
Risorgimento Italy		 Map of German unification
The Ems Telegram
The Zimmermann Telegram
President Woodrow Wilson
Fourteen Points Speech
Lenin's New Economic Policy
European Union Integration
The Unfolding of History aka
The Emergence of Modernity 		The Social Construction of Reality
Modern European History